August 05
2002

The Buffy Paradigm
hits the big time! Of all things, the New York Times gives this little devil its due. Unfortunately it requires registration to read it.

Lisa Tozzi's "Slaying Terrorism" is an op-ed column in the August 4th edition of the New York Times that does a comparison and contrast to a paper titled Biological Warfare and the Buffy Paradigm and the Buffy series itself. Almost tongue in cheek, her piece does attempt to take with some seriousness the metaphor of Buffy's tale and that of America's struggle with worldwide terrorism. Would this make George W. Bush the metaphorical equivalent of Buffy? I hope not. I hear he looks terrible in inexpensive yet fashionable clothes.

Whedon can learn more from the comparison between Buffy & Shrub than our gov't can. Season 7 should include a series of events leading Buffy to the realization that for over half a decade she's been treating the symptoms of evil in Sunnydale without actually performing a surgical strike on the cause. It's not enough to just close the Hellmouth. The Scoobies should get to the root of the cause that puts the Hellmouth there in the first place and combat that. Of course, once they won there'd be no more demons or vamps and so it'd get real boring real fast. However it would be the ideal way to properly end the series.